Road To Food Sufficiency! Our Mountains Are Bald, Be Warned of Water Crisis

The quest to achieve food sufficiency for the Filipinos today and the next generation would largely depend on how we protect and manage our remaining forest cover and our water resources.

With no intention of offending anybody, especially my friend and former fellow Cabinet Member Sec. Roy Cimatu, I would say that our effort to regreen our mountains, the National Greening Program, is moving at snail’s pace, if at all.

The first four photos attached to this post were taken in March 2019 from a helicopter piloted by Lion Air owner Archibald Po while we were flying over the Sierra Madre Mountains en route to Cagayan Valley.

These photos would explain why during the rainy season and the typhoon months, floods would ravage the agricultural lands of Cagayan Valley and during the dry season, there is not enough water for the farms.

In Mindanao, the forest cover has shrunk to about 6% today from its original area in the 1900 and while I initiated the Green Mindanao Program during my short stint as Chairman of the Mindanao Development Authority, a well-planned, coordinated, focused and sufficiently funded program must be initiated.

The problem is so huge and the threat so serious that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources should not be left alone to handle the greening program.

While the declared objective of he National Greening Program (NGP) is “to reduce poverty; promote food security, environmental stability, and biodiversity conservation; and enhance climate change mitigation and adaptation,” the NGP has largely remained as a Tree Planting Program focused mainly on reforestation.

If by God’s grace, He would lead me to the halls of the Senate, I intend to introduce a wholistic and well-coordinated approach to address this very serious problem.

The blueprint for the creation by law of an agency to be called the National Commission on Forest Conservation and Water Resources Management, a multi-agency body, is already prepared.

We have to do this fast because I fear that if we do not address this problem, water, a key factor in food sufficiency, will be our major problem in the next 10 years.

In all modesty, I would like to inform my followers and believers of my advocacies, including the skeptics and the doubters, that I did not launch a quest for a Senate seat with an empty head.

Neither am I doing this out of craving for the honor of being called Senator of the Republic.

Guided by my deep and intense love for the country and our people, I will be ready starting Day One to present the advocacies which had been burning in my heart since I was a young boy growing up in the farm.

#CommitmentOfTheFarmBoy!

#ToSenateWithBagfulOfIdeas!

(I took the photos of the bald Sierra Madre including selfies inside the helicopter with friends Archie Po and Victor Calderon. The maps of Mindanao’s forest cover was provided by an NGO helping us in the Green Mindanao Program.)